KARPOS Hosts Social Media Monitoring Workshop

On January 19th, Get The Trolls Out! partner KARPOS organized an online workshop for monitoring hate speech on social media, something which we do a lot of within the project. The workshop was led by Eline Jeanné, project coordinator at the Media Diversity Institute (MDI) and media monitor for the UK on GTTO. Below is a little bit from KARPOS about the workshop and how it went.

To see the full version in English and Greek, check the original post on the KARPOS website here.

In the run-up to the workshop we were very happy to see the interest shown by many people from different professional backgrounds. In Greece, media monitoring is not something that is done systematically by many organizations, so we were surprised and incredibly happy by the interest shown for the workshop. We felt that this was an excellent opportunity to see how widespread the idea of monitoring hate speech on social media is in Greece, who engages in this practice and also to invite people to discover this practice and include it in their work in a systematic way.

People who work in jobs related to combatting hate speech have not necessarily incorporated this technique in their work, so it was a good chance to give them another tool in their fight against hate speech.

The public discussion of whether or not there should be de-platforming of Greek personalities with a large following or/and position of power who spread hate speech on social media, that a lot of times leads to real life violence, is not as present as it is in other countries. Something that was discussed during the Q&A session of the workshop was how the lack of accountability of those figures incites violence and spreads hate speech with many times catastrophic consequences.

The people who participated in the workshop came from a range of professional backgrounds including academics, NGO employees, researchers, journalists and policy makers.

After exploring what hate speech is and how it manifests online, the participants took part in an exercise in which they had to identify wether examples of hate speech on social media could be reported or not based on community guidelines. This was then put into practice in a small-group exercise where they all took time to find and report hate speech online. Through discussing the results of the exercise, we all came to the unfortunate conclusion that it was very easy to find hate speech on social media ranging different topics (homophobia, antisemitism, anti-migrant propaganda etc). Some of the participants shared that sometimes they didn’t even have to use slurs in order to find the hate speech content it was just enough to use the terms that refer to protected groups. For example, one of the participants just used the acronym LGBTQI, and a range of homophobic tweets came up without having to search with derogatory terms. This goes to show how pervasive hate speech has become in our daily use of social media.

Another pertinent issue that came up during the workshop is how often politicians and people with large social media following propagate hate speech to their followers, which can lead to real life violence often without explicitly describing violent acts or urging their followers to do them but incite them. In these cases, because they know how to use the medium in their favor when those real-life violent acts occur, they can denounce responsibility.

KARPOS hopes to hold another workshop very soon due to the high demand we had from people to participate.